Actor-Network Theory:
Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) is a sociological theory that views society as made up of networks of both human and non-human actors (also known as “actants”). Latour states, “ANT aims at accounting for the very essence of societies and natures. It does not wish to add social networks to social theory but to rebuild social theory out of networks. It is as much an ontology or a metaphysics, as a sociology.”
These networks are sometimes described as socio-technical systems, but they can encompass more than just people and technology. ANT prescribes agency to actants based on their ability to affect the course of events within a network. Thus, the agency is not an inherent property of any actant, but rather it is realized through the actant’s relationships within a network.
To say something has agency here means simply to acknowledge its ability to influence the network through its relationships with other actants in the network. Nobody is saying your bank account can make its own choices; rather, the agency of your bank account is born out through its effects on the choices you make.
ANT Maps allow you to connect people, institutions, concepts, and inanimate objects together, showing how everything is interconnected. You can create a node that is one actant or a network of actants that you can zoom in on. The point of creating the skeleton of our society’s web (I say skeleton because it would be impossible to create an extensive map of our entire U.S. society in one semester) is to show that fixing the problems in today’s world requires much more than just taking out “one bad guy” or “a few faulty institutions.” A web doesn’t have a heart. It has to be torn down in multiple places for it to fall apart.
My skeleton map:
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